Feeding paper to high speed printers or other machines which continuously process paper or other web materials at high speeds has been accomplished by supplying a continuous web of material to the printer or processing machine and providing means for continuous removing and collecting the processed web. Some such machines are so constructed and operated to permit continuous feeding and removal of the web with no down-time requied to perform paper handling tasks (see U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,586,437 and 3,631,972).
However, some high speed printers being operated today are not capable of being fed a continuous web of paper but instead are normally operated by supplying a stack of folded web sheets, running the printer to process the stack and then stopping the printer to take out the processed stack. This sequence is then repeated. Such high speed printers have paper feed apertures and discharge apertures positioned in recesses within the machine which make continuous feeding and removal impossible. The IBM 3800 printer is an example of such a machine.
Prior web feeding and removal equipment cannot satisfactorily provide such high speed printers with the quantities of web material they are capable of processing. For this reason prior feeding equipment and techniques cannot provide continuous operating of such processing machines.